Her prose? Almost without style. Her characters? Quite ordinary. Yet Anne Tyler leaves me as thrilled and baffled by her genius

How does Anne Tyler construct such a complex narrative out of such simple sentences?

How does she do it? Each time I come to the end of a novel by Anne Tyler, I find myself asking this question.

How does she do it? How does she construct such a complex narrative out of such simple sentences?

How does she manage to give her readers the impression they have actually been living in a given household, overhearing her characters talk?

How does she capture so accurately the peculiar ebbs and flows of married life, of family life, of life itself?

Her writing style seems close to styleless. She writes ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. She eschews fancy words like ‘eschew’. She doesn’t go in for adverbs or ornament.

Her books are full of families talking about humdrum things like doing the washing-up, or going shopping or what’s for lunch, yet they are somehow more gripping than the paciest transcontinental thriller.

Her novels are all set in Baltimore, where she lives, but Tyler’s is a Baltimore far removed from the housing projects in The Wire.

This, her 20th, is set in a well-to-do house in the leafy suburbs. You could even argue that it is a novel about a house, and that the dominant character is the house itself.

Junior Whitshank built the clapboard house on Bouton Road for the wealthy Brill family, cajoling them into accepting his decisions on how it should look. ‘How he came by it nobody knew, but he had the most unerring nose for anything pretentious.’

The house on Bouton Road has a huge porch. All the floors are made of aged chestnut. The fan above the entrance hall has a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan. It is the house of Junior Whitshank’s dreams. Later, he manages to buy it off the Brills.

Like so many of Tyler’s characters, he is searching for simplicity in a world riddled with muddle. The house on Bouton Road seems to be the answer to all his prayers.

‘His life was a straight, shining road now, with a clear destination.’

A Spool Of Blue Thread traces the lives of three generations of the Whitshank family in their house on Bouton Road, right up until 2012, when the last of them moves out.

The first half of the book focuses primarily on Junior’s daughter-in-law Abby and her relationship with her husband Red and their four children, two boys and two girls. Like many of Tyler’s mothers, Abby sits at the heart of her family, yet also floats above it.

Tyler has always been interested in misfits, and the effect they have on the rest of their family. Here the misfit is their third child, Denny, who should, by rights, be the most fortunate.

A Spool Of Blue Thread traces the lives of three generations of the Whitshank family in their house

‘Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly. “Could you come in for a talk about Denny as soon as possible, please.”’ As an adult, Denny disappears for months on end, and harbours obscure resentments.

‘It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.’

‘And whenever he did come home, he was a stranger. He had a different smell, no longer the musty-closet smell but something almost chemical, like new carpeting. He wore a Greek sailor’s cap that Abby (a product of the Sixties) associated with the young Bob Dylan. And he spoke to his parents politely, but distantly. Did he resent them for shipping him off? But they hadn’t had a choice! No, his grudge must have gone further back. “It’s because I didn’t shield him properly,” Abby guessed.

‘ “Shield him from what?” Red asked.

‘ “Oh... never mind.”

‘ “Not from me,” Red told her.

‘ “If you say so.”

‘ “I’m not taking the rap for this, Abby.”

‘ “Fine.”

‘At such moments, they hated each other.’

I’ve quoted this passage at some length because it encapsulates so many of Tyler’s remarkable qualities: her uncanny feel for the rhythms and fluctuations of conversation; her clarity, which never collapses into obviousness; her authorial vantage point, which is almost that of a nosy neighbour; and, above all else, her acute understanding of character.

She has, in the past, been wrongly characterised by some critics, usually male, as homely, even mumsy.

The titles of her novels, admittedly not her strongest point, sometimes encourage this misapprehension: Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, A Patchwork Planet, Back When We Were Grownups. But while she is affectionate towards her characters, she is rarely sentimental. In fact, she has a sharp eye for all sources of irritation, and sentimentality in particular.

‘Encountering anyone with even a hint of a foreign accent,’ she writes of Abby, ‘she would seize his hand and gaze into his eyes and say, “Tell me, where is home, for you?”’

Tyler writes of Abby’s family that ‘they hated how her favourite means of connection was commiseration. “Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children’s opinion.’

Tyler can also be very funny. Like Kingsley Amis, who is in other ways her polar opposite, she likes to employ irritation as a comic springboard.

One of the lonely people Abby takes in hand is a recent immigrant to America called Atta, ‘in her late 50s or so, overweight and putty-skinned’. But Atta refuses to return Abby’s generosity with gratitude, complaining that Americans are unfriendly.

‘“Oh, they pretend to be friendly,” Atta said. “My colleagues ask, ‘How are you, Atta?’ They say, ‘Good to see you, Atta.’ But do they invite me home with them? No... They are, how do you say, two-faced.” ’ But, unlike Amis, Tyler then uses the irritation to reveal further elements in the characters of the irritated. The misfit son Denny suddenly chips in, putting Atta right: ‘In this situation, “Polite” would be more accurate.

‘They’re trying to be polite. They don’t much like you, so they don’t invite you to their homes, but they’re doing their best to be nice to you, and so that’s why they ask how you are and tell you it’s good to see you.’ And thus we glimpse another side to Denny, a side that is eager to convey truth, however uncomfortable.

Tyler has said in the past that her interest is in character, and that she would be happy to dispense with plot if she could.

Perhaps this is what makes her plots feel so organic, so unforced. They tend to revolve around the secrets that lurk at the heart of families, and the way that these secrets shape the characters both of those who are aware of them, and those who are not.

But she has a much more optimistic view of human nature than others for whom family secrets have been a guiding force – Ibsen, say, or Tennessee Williams – and her novels often testify to the fortitude with which people keep going once secrets are out.

There are many other themes in this novel – themes of old age and decrepitude, sibling rivalry, the consequences of a sudden death, the tales that define families and echo down generations, the basic human tension between security and anxiety, moving on and staying put.

Yet these themes are never underlined, emerging naturally from the interaction of the characters.

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And Tyler is the most natural of novelists. Gore Vidal once claimed that he could read any modern novel and tell you which films the novelist had watched in his youth. But I’m quite sure he would have drawn a blank with Tyler.

I know of no other novelist who draws so directly from real life, and whose work remains so uncontaminated by the shortcuts and clichés of television and Hollywood.

A Spool Of Blue Thread may be her best yet, though, to be honest, this is what I always tend to say after reading the latest Anne Tyler.

I’ve now read it twice, and I may well read it again. But still the question remains: how does she do it?